1. In South America, men's cults of the kind that we will describe occur in four regions, including the northwest Amazon, the Upper Xingu, the upper Tapajos River, and, outside of Amazonia, in the Tierra del Fuego. In Melanesia, such cults are reported principally in the Sepik, Papuan Gulf, Eastern Highlands, and Mountain Ok regions of mainland New Guinea; the off-lying islands of New Britain, New Ireland, and the Duke of York group; the Solomon Islands; and Vanuatu.

2. As fantastic as this idea may seem, it is not inconceivable. Roger Keesing, in the context of Melanesian men's cults, speculates that the myth-cult is very ancient: "These forms of male cultism are very old. … My guess is that these systems developed under either hunting-gathering or hunting-horticultural regimens" (1982, 15). Other widespread religious ideas and practices may enjoy great antiquity. In Muelos, a Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality, for example, Weston LaBarre (1984) persuasively documents a set of ideas about body imagery that may well have their roots in the Paleolithic.

3. The myths from diverse regions within Amazonia and Melanesia are very similar on this point; we are aware of only a few instances in which the flutes or cult instruments were discovered or invented by men (see Gewertz 1988, 109).

4. As Hays (1988) puts it, in examining the Amazonian myths, Melanesianists look at these tales with a sense of déjà vu.

5. Interestingly, the myth, touching so deeply on gender issues, is itself a projective screen for the unwary anthropologist. Hence in Bamberger's interpretation (1974, 280), the myth is "but a tool used to keep woman bound to her place" and suggests a path toward liberation: "to free her we need to destroy the myth." The context for understanding the myth, however, is not contemporary gender politics or Western feminism but the men's cult in which it blossoms.

6. The Arapesh myth of the penis as a meandering trickster (Tuzin 1972) pairs almost identically with the Mehinaku myths of Kapukwa and the wandering vagina (Gregor 1985). See also Murphy and Murphy (1974, 100) for other Amazonian variants.

7. We recognize that the Shipibo did not have formal men's institutions, even though they had beliefs and practices associated with the myth-cult. Their practice of clitoridectomy is the only instance we are aware of in the Amazonian and Melanesian literature. It is striking that the ideology of clitoridectomy for the Shipibo fits much better with the men's myth-cult than that of sub-Saharan Africa, where the justification is in terms of sexual modesty and decency.

8. The familiar classical myth of the Amazons, in which masculinized women cut off their left breasts to facilitate archery, may make use of some of the same elements and themes of the detachability of organs and the mutability of gender.

9. "Papua New Guineans live in a gender-inflected universe in which the polarities of male and female articulate cosmic forces thought to be located in the human body; indigenous theories of human reproduction contain within them an implicit recipe for social reproduction" (Lindenbaum 1987, 222).

10. Note that the image is nearly identical to the Melanesian example of the bullroarer, cited just above.

11. To be "beltless" (mowantalutsi) in the Mehinaku dress code is to be naked.

12. The Yahgan of Tierra del Fuego are well south of Amazonia but possessed an intense and exceptionally well-documented men's cult that parallels many of the others in both Amazonia and Melanesia.

13. What Michael Jackson reports for the Karunka of northern Sierra Leone could apply as well to many societies of Amazonia and Melanesia (and Australia), hinting that the parallel elaborations marking the latter regions are, in part, anchored in more widely occurrent social and psychological imperatives. The "work" of the cult, Jackson was told, was "to keep men and women separate" (1977, 220). "Some informants confessed," continues Jackson (p. 221), "that within the cult ‘there isn't really very much, though for the women it is awesome.’ The secret objects themselves are far less significant than the principle of secrecy and the mystical powers which they symbolise. The betrayal of cult secrets leads not only to the punishment of the offender …, it also threatens the social order. For, ‘if women have no respect for men then the principles of manhood will be as nothing.’"

14. For an especially dramatic South American example, see the illustrations of the Yurupuri flutes and trumpets from the northwest Amazon in S. Hugh-Jones (1979).

15. See Tuzin (1984) for an analysis of the sonic qualities of such instruments and their impact on the listener.

16. See Dundes (1976) for a somewhat different but persuasive interpretation, which sees the bullroarer as merging symbols of the male phallus with the anal birth of initiates. The association of the bullroarer with men's secret rituals around the world (see Lowie 1920) is in and of itself remarkable and suggests how well adapted it is as a part of the material

17. Hence Meigs (1984, 134) notes that Hua claim that if the women saw the flutes, "they would ridicule men for the stupid ruse by which they maintain their power."

18. The contaminating quality of the flutes can also affect women. Hence among the Desana, when the women touched the flutes and then their own bodies, "suddenly hair grew on their pubis and under their armpits, places that previously had no hair" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 169–170).

19. We are in debt to Volney Gay for this observation.

20. Herdt reports that men's and women's relationships are never comfortable, and that men fear women's genitals, which are "hot." The Mundurucú case, as reported by the Murphys, also suggests that the antagonism of the cult is carried on between individual men and women.

21. Stephen Hugh-Jones suggests this analogy (personal communication).

22. The vehemence of Keesing's remark is unusual in the literature even though often informally articulated by colleagues who have worked with men's cults. Although anthropology as a value-free science is in many ways laudable, the commitment to relativism produces an active bias against the study of ethical values (and moral ambivalence), especially in small-scale cultures (Tuzin 1982, 325).

23. For reasons discussed in Tuzin (1990), the inter generational transmission of cultural knowledge tends to be most pronounced in societies at the scalar extremes: the smallest, because of settlement size and subsistence regimes; the largest, because of formal educational institutions.